Janice as master griefer. Janice is a customer at Monica’s restaurant who complains about the chicken… she then invites herself to their wedding. Eventually Monica and Chandler pretend Chandler still loves her, so Janice leaves to preserve their relationship.

When Jack Sarfatti was 13 years old, he began receiving phone calls from a strange metallic voice that told him he would someday become part of an elite group of scientists exploring uncharted territory. Those calls, which he believes may have come from a computer on a spacecraft, proved a seminal influence on his life and led him to pursue a career that combined mainstream physics with an enduring interest in UFOs and the far-out reaches of science.

The history of Esalen is like a picture of a tiny stream that feeds into the Amazon – what starts as a small trickle of “travellers of the mind” feeds into a rampaging philosophical torrent destined to cut through the passion-depleted monoculture of 1950s America.

“Esalen: American and the Religion of No Relgion” reads like a grocery list of cultural mayhem; its guest list a gang of crazed midwives about to birth the freak-out of the 1960s. You could seriously spend the rest of your life diving into the lives and works of all the people mentioned in this book; it’s like a manual of post-war counterculture.

However, after reading up on new techniques with 3D printing, I bet one could get similar results printing directly in the silicone goo! I know some have tried printing in caulking, for example with the Frostruder. Note caulking would probably be too stiff for this application… but maybe could be used as a flexible tube, or the less-flexible side? In a two-goo printer maybe?

In 2001 I was visiting Tokyo and met many new friends, one of whom was bubbly voice actress Futamura Kaori. I had a cool idea – what if we made a show starring her which taught Japanese speakers American slang? Somehow we never got around to doing it; my work got in the way and we lacked the funds to put such a thing together.

It’s more than 10 years later, and the whole world has access to YouTube on their phones. Enter bubbly 24-year old Jessica Beinecke (written up here by the Washington Post), a sparkly blonde fluent in Chinese, teaching Chinese speakers American slang. Pretty cool.

The difference (I mean aside from someone actually executed on the idea and invested money into it!) is mostly technology and market – there are now markets available to watch such a show, and easy ways to get it out there.

I have mixed feelings on it. Like everyone, I always feel the twinge of jealousy that accompanies “hey I thought of that!” – even if it’s totally irrational. But OMGmeiyu is definitely slicker than what I would have put together in 2001, and it’s yet another project I can let go, because now someone has already done it, and done it well. Kudos!

Long ago, my brother and I were watching a random cartoon on local television. In it we saw an appalling sequence: a man wanders an alien forest with trees like jellyfish. Suddenly ghoulish babies surround him, dendritic stalks sticking out of their distended heads. They seem about to attack, a sickly grin on each of their faces, their eyesockets empty like a skull.

A willowy girl arrives, an alien since her skin is colored oddly, and she says something to the man. She mocks him as he cowers in panic and confusion.

All of this is in Japanese with no subtitles. We had no idea what it was from. This is in the dark years of television, when even TV Guide couldn’t really tell you what you were watching on some channels, and I think this was on KTSF or conceivably channel 38, which also showed East Asian programming.

I searched for this sequence for years, wondering what it was. I knew it had to be in the Leijiverse, since the woman looked like the women in Star Blazers / Yamato, or Captain Harlock. In vain – Captain Harlock hasn’t really been collected very competently in subtitled or dubbed versions until very recently.

Well, at last I am happy to report that, after years of searching, I’ve finally found where it was from – it’s episode 18 of the original Captain Harlock (alternately Season 2 Ep 4), about 17 minutes in. The girl is Lady Patras, Mazone agent, and the babies are baby Mazone. She laughs at the traumatized man because she was posing as his daughter, and apparently her entire childhood was a ruse.

KIRBY: almost 30 years after that traumatic incident, we can finally begin closure

Captain Harlock spends a lot of time fighting the Mazone, who are each like a cross between a Amedeo Modigliani painting on acid and a fascist broccoli dominatrix. They are alien plant women. This plant woman is Mazone warrior No. 6789, space combat squad commander Patras (occasionally spelled “Patoras”), and she’s been posing as “Midori,” the daughter of Chief Engineer Maji.

ZACH: They’re like broccoli jellyfish trees
BRAIN: yes!
ZACH: With demon children
ZACH: Like, mini pinheads
BRAIN: so imagine seeing this randomly on local TV
BRAIN: with no subtitles
BRAIN: …when you are 8
ZACH: That’s either a recipe for greatness, or disaster
BRAIN: madness!

Looks like Jason Shiga is releasing “Meanwhile” a third time, this time on iPad. It is a cool book – steer the protagonist as he travels in time, gets food poisoning, accidentally kills the world, and reads the minds of corpses. And that is just the tip of the iceberg!

My favorite edition is still the original ghetto “collated at the copy shop” version, but the color hardback is very nice.